Gaurav Majumdar

Associate Professor of English

Gaurav Majumdar received his B.A. from the University of Delhi (1992), M.A. from the University of Rochester (1993), and Ph.D. from New York University (2003).

His main areas of research are British modernism and postmodernism, as well as postcolonial literature in English. His teaching interests include British and postcolonial literatures since 1900, film, and Victorian literature. He is particularly interested in the modernist novel, aesthetics, and revisions of cosmopolitanism in literary studies.

In addition to his book, Migrant Form: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce, Rushdie, and Ray (Peter Lang, 2010), Gaurav has published articles on James Joyce, critical cosmopolitanism, Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and Howard Hawks, as well as several book reviews.

The recipient of the Dublin Award for the Study of Global Multiculturalism in 2008, Gaurav is currently working on two book-projects. The first studies the links between informality (as an aesthetic, behavioral, and political model) and a wide range of British and anglophone modernist works. Examining a particular nuance of the word "informality" in each chapter, this project investigates disgust and intimate playfulness, colloquialism, impropriety, repeatedly revised selves, and informality as a kind of ease with strangeness before its concluding discussion of the risks of informality. The focus of Gaurav's other ongoing, scholarly project is on the representation of "failed" constructions (of the self, language, friendship, sexual relations, careers, and community) in literature from former colonies and from postcolonial Britain. The project sees incompatibility and disagreement as crucial for a critically energetic cosmopolitanism.